What is "deadcart"

Usage examples of "deadcart".

He told how they'd taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picnicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.

Maybe he didn't want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it.